Teachers Teaching Teachers

In the midst of planning a re-launch of a school-based social network, Youth Voices, we happened upon a paper that clearly and fairly described the problems many of us face when we blog with students in our classrooms. In her paper in the June 2008 Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (JOLT Vol. 4, No. 2), Sarah Hurlburt discusses some of "frustrations and puzzlements" that many of us have had in using classroom blogs over the past several years.

Sarah articulates our reasons for wanting to set up a site like Youth Voices. Many of us have felt the gap between the promise of blogging and the results in our classrooms.

The point at which the instructor feels [classroom blogging] to have failed in some way, is when these individual written elements fail to interconnect – when the social element, upon which instructors place high hopes for a subsequent critical element – fails to materialize.

Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim invited Sarah Hurlburt on to our webcast to continue the dialogue about blogging, and we were joined by elementary school teachers, Lisa Parisi and Linda Nitsche.

Enjoy the podcast, and read Sarah Hurlburt's paper.

Also, we invite you to help us re-launch http://youthvoices.net on Wednesday, August 27, 2008. Join us, right here at EdTechTalk at 9:00pm Eastern / 6:00pm Pacific USA Wednesdays / 01:00 UTC Thursdays World Times.

Many of us (at least in the Northern Hemisphere), have already returned or will soon return to school. Our summer weeks of reflecting, learning, dreaming, planning, scheming are behind us. Perhaps it's useful to remember what our conversations from a few weeks back sounded like.

On this podcast, recorded a few weeks ago, Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim are joined by three other teachers who were just trying to enjoy their summer break:

Allice Barr, a technology integrator at Yarmouth High School, Maine

George Mayo, a middle school teacher and biker from Silver Spring, Maryland

Margare Fiore, an English Teacher with the New School and a member with the New York City Wriitng Project

One of the projects we've been working on this summer -- and which we discuss in this podcast -- is a new Drupal site for http://youthvoices.net. We are planning to launch the new site on our webcast this week.

We invite you to help us re-launch http://youthvoices.net on Wednesday, August 27, 2008. Join us, right here at EdTechTalk at 9:00pm Eastern / 6:00pm Pacific USA Wednesdays / 01:00 UTC Thursdays World Times.

Over the past several weeks, Paul Allison, Alice Barr, Susan Ettenheim, George Mayo, and Chris Sloan have been working with Bill Fitzgerald and other primates at Funny Monkey to move two school-based social networks, The Personal Learning Space and Youth Voices to a new Drupal site. Several teachers have been working together on these projects, and some of the curriculum that we have developed together is available here, at http://youthplans.wikispaces.com/curriculum.

On this podcast, recorded a month ago, Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim welcome a student, a teacher, and our lead reaseacher and advisor for these projects:

Much work has been done on this project, and we invite you to join us as we re-launch http://youthvoices.net on Wednesday, August 27, 2008. Join us, right here at EdTechTalk at 9:00pm Eastern / 6:00pm Pacific USA Wednesdays / 01:00 UTC Thursdays World Times

Listen to a lively conversation about how to use Shelfari-- or how to get a similar site built -- to create a social networking site for students to share their book logs, reviews, and recommendations with each other.

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